Ed Kilgore

It’s Friday the 13th, so it’s a good day for the superstitious to avoid breaking mirrors or walking under ladders or getting into the path of black cats. I’m distracting myself with a strange day of blogging in Las Vegas, which does not indicate any wild fun, but on the contrary, the best logistical route […]

I guess twenty years is long enough to dull memories and make a dubious proposition seem like a good idea, or so you might surmise from this report by Billy House at Bloomberg Business: U.S. House Republican hard-liners who helped force out former Speaker John Boehner are readying their next act: a multi-point manifesto demanding […]

Some days political news seems like a plague of frogs. But occasionally there is a bright spot, as in this week’s elections in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar), where the party of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory. More importantly, it appears Burma’s ruling military will abide by the results, which most emphatically […]

One of the more interesting moments in last week’s Fox Business debate was Donald Trump’s claim that an Eisenhower administration initiative to remove undocumented Mexican immigrants across the southern border showed that his own bright idea of deporting 11 million undocumented folks was feasible and would probably be popular: Let me just tell you that […]

Write it off as “performance art” if you wish, but in many decades of watching politics I’ve certainly never heard anything quite like Donald Trump’s attacks on Ben Carson yesterday in a CNN interview and an Iowa appearance. AP’s Jill Colvin has the basics: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, brushing aside any recent claims of […]

This Friday morning the slow-motion riot of the Republican Establishment’s panic over the unorthodox development of their party’s 2016 presidential nominating process is popping up here and there with no end to anxiety in sight. WaPo’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa sum up the fears: The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on […]

John P. Hammond (a.k.a. John Hammond, Jr.) is 73 today. Here he is covering Son House’s “Preachin’ Blues” in 1993.

Since it’s not only a federal holiday Lite Blogging Wednesday, but I’m also suddenly way under the weather, I’m going to wrap up now and turn the keys back over to Nancy and Martin for tomorrow. I’ll be back, I hope, at full strength on Friday. A happy holiday to all veterans and their loved […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Dr. Ben Carson made a pronouncement (per Yahoo‘s Hunter Walker) almost immediately after last night’s GOP presidential candidate debate aimed at shutting down any further questioning of the stirring autobiographical stories he tells in the book that made him famous, Gifted Hands: “From this point on, I get to determine what the hook […]

As Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ben Scott of New America explain in an important contribution to the new issue of the Washington Monthly, the “think tank”–or politically involved research institution–was originally a byproduct of the Progressive Movement, designed to help hidebound governing institutions respond to the popular demand for solutions to big national problems. But more […]